Tom's
Story
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Tom, a member
of the board was asked to write about his involement in
with the STAR center.
Here is his response.
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| The
problem is that I can't summarize my interest in the star
of Seattle computer lab in just a few words. |
| My
involvement in the lab begins way before lab itself existed,
and started in discussions with Carolyn Carlson from the city
of Seattle department of neighborhoods. At that point in time
I was thinking about moving out of Center Park to a location
in West Seattle and I was describing to her the psychological
nature Center Park and the people in it. ( About how many
people around here were just up on their floors staring at
the walls.) |
| Several
months later, she called me in order to do some consulting
for a community center done on Rainier which had a computer
center in it, and said that they wanted to make their computer
center more accessible to people with disabilities. Unfortunately,
they wanted to do it all in one or two stations, which doesn't
usually work because of technical compatibility problems,-but
the situation kept computers and Center Park on Carolyn Carlson's
mind. |
A while later, when the Seattle housing authority originally
offered Center Park some of its old equipment, things sort
of fell into place when the city of Seattle got involved again,
with her neighborhood technology grant programs. |
| During
college, I had been lab assistant at Seattle University, helping
to teach people BASIC and Fortran programming skills, so I
was already familiar with tutoring individuals on computer
related topics. I also have a degree in clinical biology and
had spent several years after graduating working in hospitals
on rehabilitation units with patients who had suffered strokes,
closed head injuries and spinal cord injuries etc. some of
which involved orienting patients with activities that could
be performed using a computer. |
| Later,
I worked with Dr. Marvin broke who was then the head of rehabilitation
services at Harborview medical Center. He was, among other
things, developing computer-related models for testing visual
perceptual capabilities of persons who had sustained closed
head injuries as a result of trauma. |
| In
my own life, I had been looking for a way to write faster,
because my cerebral palsy affected my manual dexterity in
such a way as to slow things down in that respect. In school,
I always done rather well except when it came to writing papers,
because my dexterity always slowed me down. I would do great
on the tests and then get an incomplete out of the course
until the papers were done. I also used tape recorders and
personnel to get note taking accomplished, but that only worked
for some situations. |
| When
IBM's Displaywriter came out, (in about 1980,) I knew that
computers were headed in that direction. (The Displaywriter
was IBM's attempt at making the first dedicated word processor,
which was the predecessor to today's PCs.) I was a college
student in really couldn't afford the Displaywriter, but I
kept my eye on the technology hoping that someday, things
would advance to the extent that it would make speech recognition
possible. |
By
the time the STAR center of Seattle had his first training
for Certified Lab Monitors in September 1999, speech recognition
technology, (in the form of Dragon NaturallySpeaking software,
was well on its way.) I had already been involved in several
of the planning stages for the STAR of Seattle, but when,
during the training of certified lab volunteers I heard about
Dragon NaturallySpeaking I was hooked for good! |
Additionally
I was also being trained alongside people who were retired
physical and occupational therapists, which made me feel right
at home given my educational background and also gave me the
feeling that the STAR center might have a chance at being
more "professional," then some of the projects that
I had seen at Center Park in the past. |
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So
as you can see there was quite a confluence of different
factors which led me to volunteer at the STAR center of
Seattle. Because of my college experience with helping people
with programming issues at Seattle University, I already
knew that I could help tutor people here. Because of my
experience with clinical biology and rehabilitation services,
I knew that I could help assess the relationship between
the technology and their medical -disability issues. Because
of my own interest in writing faster, I developed an insatiable
interest in speech recognition technology.
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I
don't really know how to summarize all this in three or four
sentences. Perhaps you could help.
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I
thought It was just fine, so I left it a it is. Thank you
Tom. |
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